Friday, September 21, 2012

Beneath the Oceans, Amongst the Stars

The use of Google Maps is probably the least interesting aspect of this application but I love it anyway. Seafloor Explorer is a crowd-sourced effort to identify species and ground cover in images of the seafloor.

The application presents an image of the seafloor and asks the user to identify the ground cover and any species that are present in the image. The crowd-sourced results will then help create a library of seafloor life in the habitats along the northeast continental shelf.

When the user has finished classifying the species in the image a still satellite image from Google Maps / Google Earth is displayed showing the location of the section of sea floor that has just been classified.

If this crowd-sourced based approach to classifying images strikes you as being rather familiar then you might not be surprised to learn that it is from the same team behind Galaxy Zoo.

Galaxy Zoo wants your help in classifying galaxies from images taken by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Hubble Space Telescope.